Opportunity is knocking now for red-hot East Kerry
IF the East Kerry footballers are a devilishly tricky bunch to pin down on the field, their manager, Jerry O’Sullivan, is a much more straight-forward proposition. The Firies man is a straight talker, with no side-stepping or trickery.
Ask a straight question and O’Sullivan gives back a straight answer.
The obvious question after this latest county championship win is if 2018 presents the best - if not necessarily the only - chance for this team to win the title, given that they lose the Kilcummin players at the end of this campaign?
“A lot of people are saying (2018 is a huge opportunity) but to be quite honest about it 2019 could be a big year for East Kerry football. But, of course, Kilcummin coming in has given a great injection, and they say there’s a great opportunity there, but at the moment we’re after winning three games in the championship and we’re now at the semi-final stage. And we’re now just going to focus on the next game, and we’ll deal with it,” he says.
“Will we disappear if we don’t reach a county final this year? No we won’t. But, yes, you take the opportunity when it’s there and that’s what we’ve done in the matches heretofore.
“The only objective today was to go out and win it,” O’Sullivan says of Sunday’s result against South Kerry. “It was a quarter-final, that’s all it was. We hadn’t a game in three weeks and I think it showed out there for the first twenty, twenty-five minutes. I think when we got going we started moving the ball a bit better. They sat back, and when teams sit back like that I knew we’d get little pockets of space, and we got the scores.
“They’re a great bunch of lads. This is my second year with them, last year we kind of got it together and this year we had the injection of the Kilcummin fellas, five or six of them came in and they just bring a different dynamic again to it. These fellas are hungry for it. They want to play football and the want to do the best that they can, and just leave them at it.”
Three county minor titles and an U-21 title of late is channelling serious talent into the senior panel, and O’Sullivan is fairly clear where the credit lies.
“I think that’s down to the schools, and that’s being honest about it. St Brendan’s (College) is there...but you just have a good bunch of fellas that come up together. There’s Firies fellas friendly with Kilcummin boys or friendly with the Listry boys they went to school with or the Spa guys. These fellas socialise together, some of their best friends are in oppo- site teams. That’s makes it easier then (with East Kerry) and they push each other. They want to be better than the next fella. And then in the clubs you might get a good bunch of players every seven, eight, nine years, it’s just happened with East Kerry that there’s a core bunch of good players there for the last five or six years.”
Next up is a Dingle team that East Kerry have already beaten by 18 points. An easy semi-final win so?
“That wasn’t the Dingle team the last day and it wasn’t a true reflection of them. In the second half we just took off and in the last twenty minutes Dingle stopped playing, I felt. I watched them against Stacks (quarter-final) and they looked like a completely different team. I will have no problem getting our fellas down, they know the challenge that Dingle will pose,” their manager assures.